A large customer from the health sector asked us to review their SAP platform strategy for the future five years and beyond, looking for a future-proof platform that provides the same levels – or higher, of course – of performance and availability as their current platform: IBM Power servers running AIX and Oracle databases. With about 100 SAP systems, several 100.000 SAPS and about 90 TB of databases, the environment is an important and critical part of the customer’s overall infrastructure.
The new environment needed to meet validation/qualification, FDA and GMP requirements, provide high availability and disaster recovery. It also should support future SAP versions and trends such as In-Memory-Computing and provide a path towards cloud computing.
As in all REALTECH architecture studies, the platform alternatives are always compared to the status quo of the customer. For the future platform, we first did a resizing of the environment for the latest IBM Power servers, with AIX and Oracle Database. Then we developed multiple alternatives, including options with IBM Power blades and x64 blade servers based on AMD or Intel processors. Changing from Oracle Database to a different product was not an option for our customer, because they are running a large non-SAP environment on Oracle, and changing that standard would have led to immense cost, if at all possible in a qualified and validated environment.
In order to get a complete picture of the financial implications, we analyzed hardware cost, software licenses, transition and training cost, and we estimated future cost of and potential savings in operation.
Since our customer has licensed their databases on a per-core model, the number of CPU cores for the databases needed to be kept to a minimum in order to keep database cost low. SAP’s layer model, available since the introduction of NetWeaver, provides the flexibility to separate the overall stack into multiple layers, isolating the database on a small number of servers. The next graphic shows our general approach.
2012 REALTECH Consulting
All alternatives – including the current platform with the latest server models – were compared against each other, looking at criteria such as technical details, risks and many more. Finally all options were compared from a financial perspective. The current setup, a classical CI/DB configuration supplemented by application servers where necessary, was calculated first, as a baseline, shown as 100% below. Of course, just keeping the existing setup and transferring it from Power6 to Power7 does not generate any transition costs.
Not even looking at the technical advantages, our approach with a layered architecture pays off immediately from an economic standpoint, even if there is no change of the processor architecture. Not changing the OS has the significant advantage of not producing noteworthy transition costs due to the lack of necessity of a heterogeneous migration. However, please note that Oracle would have profited disproportionally from this move. Due to the core-based licensing and the different core factors assigned to Power and x64, this option would have provided overall savings of a bit more than 20% but shifted revenue from IBM to Oracle.
REALTECH was convinced there is a better way, and that it should be possible to create a layered architecture that would push the limits of availability up while still lowering operational costs more than 20%. Our cost comparisons of all alternatives then showed that moving to x64 with Linux and Oracle RAC in a layered setup would provide significant savings per year, of course requiring a large initial investment for a transition project. Annual cost is about 54% of the baseline and the cost of transition is about 127% of the annual cost of today’s architecture.
2012 REALTECH Consulting
By automating deployment and daily operations to a maximum degree and by strictly using standards for components and configurations, the cost of operation can be limited, despite a slightly higher number of components in the new architecture.
The new architecture is strictly based on a layered model, using virtual machines for the application layer. Every SAP system uses at least two application servers, one in each data center. In this setup, SAP central services share a two-node cluster based on two virtual machines with SLES HA Extension.
At the database layer, the customer benefits from rich experience with Oracle RAC in their non-SAP environment. Compared to many 2-node clusters for the databases, using Oracle RAC significantly reduces the number of servers for the database layer and therefore also minimizes the amount of database licenses, although RAC licenses are more expensive than standard ones.
Besides purely financial aspects the customer has decided to move to x64 with SLES for SAP Applications because this combination meets their performance & availability requirements and because it offers a roadmap towards affordable In-Memory-Computing as well as moving into a private cloud computing model. It also will enable our customer to streamline their procurement and provisioning processes. After completion of the project, our customer will run x64 servers exclusively and Linux and Windows as their only operating systems, at least in their SAP data centers.
The new architecture is being implemented in a phased approach and the pilot environment for the development systems is about to be finalized at the same time as this whitepaper.
2012 REALTECH Consulting